After Burning His Candle At Both Ends,

Smokin' Joe Camel Flamed Out

The controversial dromedary/dude passed away sometime Sunday at his luxury condo in the heart of tobacco country.

Camel's body was discovered after a neighbor alerted police that she had not heard his usual hacking and gasping for several hours.

Although Camel had many enemies, police are not considering his death suspicious. A preliminary autopsy listed the cause as ``natural consequences.'' Yet to be determined is which smoking-related illness actually killed him.

It was just five years ago that one of Camel's closest friends, Wayne McLaren, ``The Marlboro Man,'' passed away at age 51 from lung cancer.

Camel came to prominence in the late-1980s. He was created by a California advertising man named Mike Salisbury, who also coined the name ``501 Jeans.'' In creating Camel's look, Salisbury copied the expressive eyebrows of James Bond, as played by Sean Connery. The hairline and the Ray-Bans were taken from the Don Johnson character in the TV series ``Miami Vice.'' Salisbury said he always viewed Camel as being about 30 years old.

Contrary to some theories, Salisbury said, the shape of Camel's face was never intended to exhibit any phallic overtones. Salisbury also said Camel was not supposed to appeal to kids, and that images which appealed to the young, such as spiked hair or guitar-playing, were routinely rejected.

But while Camel may, or may not, have been intentionally positioned to lure children and teenagers, he did just that.

Studies show that teens start smoking to rebel, to bond, to look sophisticated, to be cool, and Joe Camel playing saxophone in his leather jacket reinforced all those things. Predictably, when adults began to complain about Camel, it only increased his popularity.

At the height of his fame, one government survey found that 30 percent of 3-year-olds and 91 percent of 6-year-olds were able to identify Camel as a symbol of smoking. Another study credited him with increasing Camel's share of the teen market from 3 percent to 13 percent in five years.

Everything seemed to be going Camel's way during the early '90s. Business was good, his likeness was everywhere, and he even had his own line of clothing and gear. As his celebrity and effectiveness grew, the suave-as-he-wannabe icon began running with a fast tobacco-industry crowd that included R.J. Reynolds, Benson & Hedges, Philip Morris and Pall Mall. For a time, he was romantically linked with Virginia Slims.

But then the clouds of secondhand smoke began to shift.

Increasingly, Camel became the whipping boy for all the horrors associated with cigarette smoking. In one counter-ad campaign he was called Joe Chemo and pictured with tubes running into his arm.

At first, RJR and company stood by Camel, but as the pressure mounted that support started to wane. In 1995, RJR decided to pull Camel from outdoor billboards, and this July, he was forced to take early retirement.

Interestingly, RJR's new ad campaign features sexy humans and the slogan: ``What You're Looking For.'' It represents one of the biggest switches in advertising strategy at RJR since the late 1940s, when the company used the slogan: ``More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.''

As is the case with 80 percent of adult smokers, Camel acquired the cigarette habit as a teenager. His addiction to nicotine gradually grew worse, and he was a two-pack-a-day guy most of his adult life.

He tried to stop as recently as a few months ago after viewing a shocking California anti-smoking ad. In the spot, a woman named Debi Austin, who lost her larynx to cancer, is shown smoking a cigarette and exhaling through the hole in her neck where her voice box used to be.

Camel's unsuccessful attempt to break the habit was not unusual. About 42 percent of the nation's 46 million smokers try to quit each year; 86 percent of them fail. People close to Camel said he was diagnosed with emphysema three years ago but tried to keep his condition secret for the obvious professional reasons.

Emphysema, which is irreversible, destroys the elasticity of lung tissue. People with the disease are able to inhale air but do not have the lung strength to exhale. At first, the condition hurts a person's lifestyle, eventually restricting its victim to home, a single room, a chair or bed. Breathing ceases becoming an unconscious function, turning instead into a breath-by-breath struggle for air.

It is often said that the unfortunate things for people who have severe emphysema is that they don't die from it, but continue to live with it.

In recent months, Camel reportedly spent the first 45 minutes of every morning coughing up a cup or more of mucus in an attempt to clear his ravaged lungs. He was confined to bed the rest of the day, usually unable to speak more than a few words at once, or even go to the bathroom without assistance. A container of bottled oxygen was a constant companion.